The accessibility and consumption of video content over the Internet has grown exponentially in recent years. As a result, more and more users have shifted to watching or accessing video content on and through Internet-connected devices capable of reaching a variety of video content resources spread throughout the world. In connection with this shift of viewing habits to accessing Internet-based video content, video content providers have sought to help monetize and support such video delivery by incorporating video-based advertisements into and around the video content requested by users.
Video content providers would like to know whether a particular video served to a user over the Internet is actually received or watched by the user in its entirety. The ability for users to skip or fast-forward past certain videos, or certain portions of videos, means that content providers may know only whether a particular video is requested, but not whether it is actually received or watched by the user. Additionally, many devices do not have the requisite software (player, web kit, browser, etc) to initiate or respond to request from internet servers delivering and/or logging requests and responses. Such uncertainty as to whether videos are actually watched by the requesting user may limit the desirability or incentive for many video content producers to make their video content accessible over the Internet. For example, advertisers may desire to include a short video advertisement around certain highly-requested videos. However, some devices that stream interne video, including but not limited to first generation set top boxes (STBs) may not provide sufficient levels of communication to the advertisers that their advertisements are actually received and watched by users.
Lacking such communication ability, many advertisers refuse to distribute their advertisements to those devices in connection with online video content.
As a result, there is a need to provide better information to video advertisers regarding delivery of their video content, including advertising content, through Internet-connected devices. Before the Digital Video Ad Serving Template (VAST), there was not a common in-stream advertising protocol for video players, which made scalable distribution of ads impossible for ad servers. In order to serve ads to multiple publishers using disparate proprietary video players, ad-serving organizations had to develop slightly different ad responses for every publisher/video player targeted. This approach was expensive and did not easily scale. Additionally, the ad servers could not receive a response from many devices indicating that the ad had been played.